Review of “Listen Liberal” by Thomas Frank (ISBN 9781925228885)

This book explains when the Democratic Party decided to abandon organized labor, befriend Wall Street, and embrace the professional, instead of the working, class. It explains how Bill Clinton put a bullet in the head of an already-injured New Deal, ushered in a new era of “meritocracy” and its close friend, social and economic inequality. It explains how and why all of Obama’s “best and brightest” simply ended up doing what the Republicans had done before them. It explains why — even in Bright Blue states like Rhode Island and Massachusetts — economic inequality has not been addressed or repaired by Democrats. It takes us from Boston to Fall River, one of the poorest cities just a short ride away. It looks at the record of Duval Patrick, once an “Obama Lite” governor, one who started his professional career at Ameriquest and ended up at Bain Capital.

But Democrats can’t help it. This is who they are. Clinton the First, Clinton the Second, Obama, and many other “meritocracy” Democrats draw Frank’s scrutiny. Their friends, the Eric Schmidts, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerbergs, are their idols. Their shared values are with pharmaceutical magnates and software developers, hedge fund managers and dot.com billionaires. Long gone are Democratic friendships with captains of organized labor such as the teamsters or the teachers. Half the time Democrats at war with Labor (think Rahm Emanuel’s and Arne Duncan’s attacks on teachers). The New Democrats are nothing like FDR’s allies of the common man. Instead, they are smug, well-fed, well-educated functionaries, “gatekeepers” who serve the ruling class yet still like to think of themselves as the Democrats of their fathers’ generation — all while betraying them.

They are a separate economic class — themselves neither fish nor fowl, workers nor oligarchs. They have no idea where their allegiances lie. They think they’re voting for the common man but they live, dress, and eat better — and then they wonder why their noble gestures aren’t appreciated.

Frank concludes his book with this:

“It is time to face the obvious: that the direction the Democrats have chosen to follow for the last few decades has been a failure for both the nation and for their own partisan health.”Failure” is admittedly a harsh word, but what else are we to call it when the left party in a system chooses to confront an epic economic breakdown by talking hopefully about entrepreneurship and innovation? When the party of professionals repeatedly falls for bad, self-serving ideas like bank deregulation, the “creative class,” and empowerment through bank loans? When the party of the common man basically allows aristocracy to return?

Now, all political parties are alliances of groups with disparate interests, but the contradictions in the Democratic Party coalition seem unusually sharp. The Democrats posture as the “party of the people” even as they dedicate themselves ever more resolutely to serving and glorifying the professional class. Worse: they combine self-righteousness and class privilege in a way that Americans find stomach-turning. And every two years, they simply assume that being non-Republicans is sufficient to rally the voters of the nation to their standard. This cannot go on.

Yet it will go on, because the most direct solutions to the problem are off the table for the moment. The Democrats have no interest in reforming themselves in a more egalitarian way. There is little the rest of us can do, given the current legal arrangements of this country, to build a vital third-party movement or to revive organized labor, the one social movement that is committed by its nature to pushing back against the inequality trend.

What we can do is strip away the Democrats’ precious sense of their own moral probity – to make liberals live without the comforting knowledge that righteousness is always on their side. It is that sensibility, after all, that prevents so many good-hearted rank-and-file Democrats from understanding how starkly and how deliberately their political leaders contradict their values. Once that contradiction has been made manifest – once that smooth, seamless sense of liberal virtue has been cracked, anything becomes possible. The course of the party and the course of the country can both be changed, but only after we understand that the problem is us.”

I would also add — don’t automatically give your vote to a party that hasn’t earned it.

Review of “Among Strange Victims” by Daniel Saldaña París, Christina MacSweeney (Translation) (ISBN 9781566894302)

Among Strange Victims has an unlovable protagonist who is content with his peeling walls and his boring daily rituals. He apparently told his family he was attending college but dropped out almost immediately. The description of his day is boring in the extreme, and unfortunately this does not make for good fiction. As he puts it, “one of my strengths is an ability to enjoy the most trivial situations intensely.” Sadly, most readers do not have this same strength.

Our lazy protagonist, who doesn’t even bother to identify himself at the beginning of his story, spends considerable time on a “disintegrating” bench in a gazebo, watching people. When he is not doing this he is working in a museum editing press releases and proofreading the catalog. In one chapter we learn how he goes to a cafe, has a cup of tea and returns home with the soggy tea bag, which he hangs on the wall. Gripping narrative – this is not. At about this point the reader is ready to stretch his arms a couple of thousand miles and and throttle the author.

By the time the narrator has accumulated ten teabags on his wall, still not much has happened in the story, which until now has been a tale of boredom, shirking, and masturbation. And then he decides to save the life of a hen in the vacant lot next door. He throws a table into the lot, and goes down to position it as a suitable shelter. Which is when he discovers a grisly bag full of putrefying viscera.

But now we once again enter stagnant waters when his co-worker Cecilia is sent a prank marriage proposal in his name, and she accepts. For the first time we learn the narrator’s name: Rodrigo Saldivar.

The book goes on in his way for many hundreds of thousands of keystrokes, each of them more painful than the one before. There is the mystery of a turd on his bed. Then we meet a BolaÒo type academic slumming in Mexico, an elusive and dissolute philosopher-boxer the academic is studying while living with the narrator’s mother, and a shady gringo who bought a nubile young girl whose urine is used for rituals.

In the end not much is resolved, although we do finally learn who has deposited the turd on the bed.

I am not sure if my quarrel is with the work itself or with the translation, but it is neither an easy nor a pleasant, nor a rewarding read. I have limited patience for writers who, rather than invite you into their heads and hearts, try to keep you at arm’s length or deposit turds on the pages of the book you bought from them. The book has an intellectual conceit, but it’s a rather shallow one.

BTW, if you want to see another sample of SaldaÒa ParÌs’s writing, which demonstrates more talent than this first disaster of a novel, here is a piece he wrote for Electric Literature:

http://electricliterature.com/planes-flying-over-a-monster-the-writing-life-in-mexico-city-954a79f43165

For the giveaway pile.